UPDATED
Belarus opposition leader urges EU to support her ‘awakening’ country

AND THEY DO  AFP VIDEO REPORT ADDED AT THE END


Protesters against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stand in front of the Minsk Tractor Factory holding posters supporting workers.
(Dmitri Lovetsky / Associated Press)

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUG. 19, 2020

MINSK, Belarus —

The Belarusian opposition leader has called on European leaders not to recognize “fraudulent elections” that extended the rule of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko and sparked unprecedented mass protests in the country.

In a video statement released ahead of EU leaders’ emergency summit on the situation Wednesday, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya urged them to support “the awakening of Belarus.”

“I call on you not to recognize these fraudulent elections. Mr. Lukashenko has lost all the legitimacy in the eyes of our nation and the world,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

Lukashenko, who has been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator,” has run the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist since 1994, and won a sixth term with 80% of votes in an Aug. 9 election widely seen as rigged. Tsikhanouskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher and political novice who united fractured opposition groups and drew tens of thousands to rally in her support, got only 10%.

She dismissed the results as falsified and demanded a recount, but then suddenly left the country for Lithuania in a move her campaign said was made under duress. Thousands of protesters have been arrested by authorities and have alleged beatings and other abuse.

On Wednesday morning, rallies resumed in Minsk, and police once again started detaining protesters. Nearly 50 people were detained in front of the Minsk Tractor Factory, where workers have been on strike since Monday, according to Sergei Dylevsky, leader of the factory’s strike committee.


‘Go away!’ Workers heckle Belarus leader as support collapses around him
Aug. 17, 2020

“People are on strike demanding Lukashenko’s resignation, and authorities respond with batons and riot police,” Dylevsky said. “Lukashenko is not changing.”

Police also blocked all entrances to the Janka Kupala National Theater in Minsk, where the troupe on Tuesday gave notice en masse after its director, Pavel Latushko, was fired for siding with protesters. Actors who arrived at the theater Wednesday morning were not allowed in.

“It’s unprecedented that, in the 21st century, law enforcement is deployed to a cultural institution. The situation speaks for itself,” Latushko said.

It’s not entirely clear what the European Union can do right now, but its leaders appear determined to help maintain the momentum for change in Minsk with a show of political support and to revive a sanctions program on Belarus that was eased four years ago as relations with Lukashenko improved.


Women move to forefront of protests sweeping Belarus over disputed election results
Aug. 13, 2020

In a letter inviting the bloc’s leaders to the video summit, EU Council President Charles Michel said of Lukashenko’s crackdown that “what we have witnessed in Belarus is not acceptable.” He said the “violence against peaceful protesters was shocking and has to be condemned. Those responsible must be held to account.”

Earlier this week, Tsikhanouskaya said she was ready to act as a national leader to facilitate a rerun of the election, and her associates announced the formation of a “coordination council” to help create a platform for a peaceful transition of power.

“I have initiated the national coordination council of Belarus. It will lead the process of a peaceful transition of power via dialogue. It will immediately call for new fair and democratic presidential elections with international supervision,” Tsikhanouskaya said in the latest video statement.

Lukashenko has repeatedly rejected demands to step down and bristled at the idea of talks with the opposition, denouncing the coordination council Tuesday as “an attempt to seize power.” Nevertheless, the council is set to convene for the first time Wednesday.

Hundreds of thousands of people have protested in Belarus since Aug. 9. The rallies have continued for 10 straight days despite a brutal response from the police, who in the first four days of demonstrations detained almost 7,000 people and injured hundreds with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs. At least two protesters died.

This week, workers at several major industrial plants, including a huge factory that accounts for a fifth of the world’s potash fertilizer output, have started a strike demanding Lukashenko’s resignation.

UPDATED
Mudslides and dramatic rescues as China hit by floods

Issued on: 19/08/2020

Text by:FRANCE 24

Video by:Sam BALL  AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE 

From a 1,300 statue under threat of being submerged to houses swept away by mudslides and dramatic rescues of stranded civilians, some of the worst flooding seen in decades has wreaked havoc across the Chinese province of Sichuan following heavy rains.

The toes of the 71-metre Buddha statue in Leshan were submerged in water on Tuesday, August 18, the first time that has happened in 70 years, state media reported.

The threat to the statue, built in 713 AD, is just one example of how the vast floods are threatening lives, infrastructure and heritage.

Heavy rains since the weekend have triggered flooding across China’s Sichuan Province, forcing authorities to activate the highest level of a four-tier flood alert system for the first time on record, while parts of the provincial capital Chengdu have been hit by the worst flooding since 1981, authorities said.

The floods have triggered mudslides that have destroyed homes and property and the rising waters have devastated swathes of farmland.

More than 100,000 people had been evacuated as of Tuesday while emergency services have rescued hundreds of people trapped by the flooding, say authorities.

Rescue efforts have not just been limited to the region's human population. Amateur footage captured the moment firefighters rushed to save a number of dogs from a pet hospital in Chengdu on Friday.

More than 63.4 million have been affected by flooding in regions across China this year, according to authorities, with the country being battered by unusually heavy rains since early June.

A total of 219 people have died or remain missing as of August

Severe flooding affects giant Buddha statue in China  

Beijing, Aug 18 (Prensa Latina) The famous Buddha of Leshan, a giant statue located in the southwestern province of Sichuan, for the first time in 70 years is suffering the floods that are affecting the area today and keeping it on extreme alert.

Although rescue teams erected dikes with sandbags, the waters of nearby rivers reached the feet of the colossus this morning and covered them completely.

The event is a cause for concern and has led to the activation of the highest contingency phase for natural disasters, since an old local belief indicates that when this happens, the entire city will be flooded.

The statue is the largest ancient piece of its kind in the world and also the largest stone representation of the Buddha.

Its construction took 90 years to complete and was the brainchild of a monk named Haitong, who was concerned about the regular whirlwinds and floods that caused the confluence of the Ming, Qingyi and Dadu Rivers, which made the city a major river trade center at the time.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization included it in its list of heritage treasures in 1996. 

ef/abo/tgj/ymr

China evacuates 100,000 as floods threaten heritage site

Floodwater reaches the Leshan Giant Buddha's feet following heavy rainfall, in Leshan, Sichuan province, China August 18, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Floods on the upper reaches of China’s Yangtze river forced authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people on Tuesday and threatened a 1,200-year-old world heritage site.

Staff, police and volunteers used sandbags to try to protect the 71-metre (233-foot) Leshan Giant Buddha, a UNESCO World Heritage site in southwestern Sichuan province, as muddy flood water rose over its toes for the first time since 1949, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Sichuan, through which the Yangtze river flows, raised its emergency response to the maximum level on Tuesday to cope with a new round of torrential rainfall.

The Yangtze Water Resources Commission, the government body that oversees the river, declared a red alert late on Tuesday, saying water at some monitoring stations was expected to exceed “guaranteed” flood protection levels by over 5 metres.

The Three Gorges Project, a massive hydroelectric facility designed in part to tame floods on the Yangtze, is expected to see water inflows rise to 74,000 cubic metres per second on Wednesday, the highest since it was built, the Ministry of Water Resources said.

The project restricts the amount of water flowing downstream by storing it in its reservoir, which has been over 10 metres higher than its official warning level for more than a month.

The facility was forced to raise water discharge volumes on Tuesday in order to “reduce flood control pressures”, the water ministry said.

Authorities have been at pains to show that the cascade of giant dams and reservoirs built along the Yangtze’s upper reaches have shielded the region from the worst of the floods this year, though critics say they might be making things worse.

VIDEO INTERNATIONAL MIGRANTS DAY

UN hails aid workers after record attacks

According to the Aid Worker Security Database major attacks against humanitarians last year surpassed all previous years since records began in 1997.
Issued on: 19/08/2020

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, left, at a Geneva wreath-laying ceremony marking World Humanitarian Day 

Fabrice COFFRINI AFP

Geneva (AFP)

The United Nations paid tribute Wednesday to humanitarian workers now battling the COVID-19 pandemic after a year in which they found themselves under greater attack than ever before.

The UN marked its World Humanitarian Day by remembering the 125 aid workers who were killed in 2019 and the hundreds of others who were wounded or kidnapped.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet took part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the United Nations in Geneva.

"Let's never forget their love for humanity that led them to the ultimate sacrifice: their lives," she said.

According to the Aid Worker Security Database compiled by the Humanitarian Outcomes research group, major attacks against humanitarians last year surpassed all previous years since records began in 1997.

In 277 separate incidents around the world, a total of 483 relief workers were attacked, of whom 125 were killed, 234 wounded and 124 kidnapped.

The figure represents an 18-percent increase in the number of victims compared to 2018.

Most of the attacks occurred in Syria, followed by South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan and the Central African Republic.

OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said each attack was a tragedy for those targeted, but also for the thousands of vulnerable people they were trying to assist.

"The UN condemns these attacks, and it calls for accountability for perpetrators and justice for survivors. Relief workers cannot be a target," said OCHA.

- 'Unsung heroes' -

The UN said aid workers and healthcare responders were now going to extraordinary lengths to help people whose lives have been upended by crises -- and now by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

"This year, humanitarian workers are stretched like never before," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

"They are responding to the global crisis of COVID-19, and with it the massive increase in humanitarian needs from the fallout of the pandemic.

"They are the unsung heroes of the pandemic response -- and they all too often risk their own lives to save the lives of others."

On Tuesday, the Red Cross said more than 600 attacks on health workers and patients had been reported in connection with the COVID-19 crisis.

The ceremony in Geneva also remembered seven aid workers with French non-governmental organisation ACTED who were killed at a wildlife haven in Niger on August 9.

Luca Pupulin, who heads IMPACT Initiatives, which is part of the ACTED group, read out the names of the victims.

"We ask for the international community to come together to end impunity and to treat every attack against humanitarians as an attack -- and a crime -- against humanity," he said.

World Humanitarian Day is held on the anniversary of the August 19, 2003 attack on the UN compound in Baghdad which killed 22 people.

Since then, nearly 5,000 humanitarians have been killed, wounded or abducted in attacks around the world.

© 2020 AFP

WHITE SUPREMACY USA

To Be Black In This Country Is To Live A Life Of Trespass

Wandering around the abandoned Pittsburgh of my youth instilled a desire to go wherever I wanted — even as a Black man living in America.

Elwin CotmanBuzzFeed Contributor
Posted on August 18, 2020, at 3:04 p.m. ET

Ross Mantle
The Carrie Furnace in Rankin, Pennsylvania


Every other day, I go running. It helps me stay active while the gyms are closed, and gets me out of the house and away from doomscrolling despair. Go one direction out my front door and the terrain descends into the predominantly Latinx section of East Oakland. In the opposite direction, the land inclines. And inclines. And inclines. Before long, I am in the Oakland Hills with its socially distanced outdoor cafe seating. Here you can walk into a grocery store without waiting in line, though you’ll be paying more. The million-dollar houses are mission-style, Bavarian-style, Japanese-style, pretty much any style the owners wish. I see white people, mostly older women, standing at an intersection with BLM signs. People honk support. Too little, too late. But it’s nice.

Further up, the houses grow even larger. The air is sweeter. The land is greener. The only people of color here are myself and landscapers. I see the faces of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor on signs. A perverse happiness buzzes inside me to see Black life acknowledged in the Hills, where any manner of atrocities could have been committed in pursuit of these Parasite homes. I see a sign for Ahmaud Arbery, who was gunned down by white vigilantes while jogging. Even prior to his killing, committed in daylight and videotaped like the lynching photos of old, I knew to stay careful jogging in a ritzy area. All it takes is one call to the cops. No doubt Ahmaud Arbery knew that too. Still he put his Black body into a world that wished him dead; he saw the invisible “DO NOT ENTER” signs and entered, rather than live in fear.

In Pittsburgh, I learned to love trespass. My earliest memory of going where I wasn’t allowed happened when I was in Catholic school in the suburbs. It was a miserable experience of racist bullying from students and teachers alike. From third grade on, teachers called me lazy in front of the class, and miniature white supremacists physically assaulted me daily while spewing racial slurs.


When I was 11, I joined the speech club. One day, I arrived at a meeting and realized I’d forgotten my speech at home. I shamefacedly informed the adviser.

She looked repulsed. “Then leave.”

Having been a teacher for over a decade, I can’t fathom casting an elementary student out like that — even nowadays with cameras everywhere, and certainly not in the “stranger danger”–obsessed 1990s. But for the first time in life, I found myself unsupervised. I had the school’s campus to myself, and it was gloriously empty.

I walked to the pond and watched the geese drift over water gilded in afternoon sunlight. I crossed to the other side of campus and explored the woods as far as I dared until fairy-tale nightmares started playing on my psyche. But most transgressive of all, I returned to the school building and climbed the steps past the second-floor classrooms to the off-limits third floor. As I’d suspected, all I found were boring, utilitarian dorms for the nuns. The excitement came from trespassing on my own terms.

I grew up in Pittsburgh. I was born in West Penn Hospital. I’ve visited WQED Studios and seen the inside of Allegheny County Jail. When I was 12 years old, I won first and second place in a poetry contest. The judge was August Wilson. The living embodiment of Pittsburgh liked my stuff; that’s how Pittsburgh I am.

Up until the city’s rapid gentrification in the 2010s, Pittsburgh looked postapocalyptic in many places. After the steel left, many residents departed as well, but the buildings remained. Mercifully we weren’t subjected to the doomsday rhetoric that Detroit had to deal with, mainly because Pittsburgh isn’t considered a “Black” town; Pittsburghers got to be “blue-collar” instead of “ghetto,” so the mass media didn’t shame us and bemoan empty houses as some catastrophe.

As an adolescent, I accompanied my dad to the flea market outside Eastland Mall, a dead mall even then. I perused vendors for comic books until, growing bored, I’d venture inside the mall itself, a rectangular cave, dimly lit, with one or two stores still open. Seeing retractable barriers in front of a nonworking escalator, I would step around the stanchions and descend like Link from Zelda to dungeonlike office spaces, a dusty landscape of hanging tarps and sunlight through mildew-worn holes. An abandoned world, freer and more open than the claustrophobic one I’d left behind.

Finding forbidden places was my version of the wardrobe, the rabbit hole, the golden ticket. In college, I discovered urban exploring. I would search for wild and bucolic spots within the corpses of former industrial sites. I felt daring, knowing any journey could end with my death— killed for stepping an inch out of line. The Wilkinsburg neighborhood had many abandoned Victorians, with wood nailed over the doors. I scaled awnings to enter through upper story windows. Often the houses were fully furnished. I would find beds in bedrooms and sofas in living rooms, a vision of domesticity among shards of glass and plaster.

Finding forbidden places was my version of the wardrobe, the rabbit hole, the golden ticket.

By my senior year of college, I decided my skills honed enough to tackle the abandoned hotel downtown on Mount Washington. I mostly traveled alone because companions felt like burdens; I was an introvert, fine with my own thoughts for company. Finding the front door padlocked, I trekked the woods to the wall overlooking the Monongahela River. From there, using every ounce of upper body strength I’d built in my dorm’s weight room, I scaled the wall 15 feet and made it onto a patio. After some exploring the hotel rooms, I scaled the outer wall again and entered a space I could only assume had been a ballroom. From the patio, I had a view of downtown Pittsburgh grander than any I’d seen before — a view the hotel’s owner decided to keep to themselves long after the building itself lost value.

The Carrie Furnace in Rankin is the Sistine Chapel of abandoned Pittsburgh, a sprawling, decaying steel mill on the Monongahela. You needed to devote a whole day because getting there took time, and once you got there, you had to stay awhile. I always went in a group, as getting lost was a possibility, and the expansiveness of the mill called for collective awe. One time I fell in love with someone, so I took her to this place.

Park near the postwar bungalows that cling to the hillside, take a pebble-strewn trail through woods full of litter until you reach a fence. Crawl through the hole in the fence. Walk down a gravel road next to an elevated train track and then through a field of overgrown grass to the chain-link gates, broken and twisted. Nature has taken over; trees grow up through the grates and butterflies rest on moss-grown chains. The titanic chimneys are coated in graffiti. The air teems with history and quietude. I remember my friends and I climbing ladders to the catwalks so we could stare over the valley. We walked back at night and hid under cover of trees until the police helicopters were gone. Nowadays, it’s a tourist attraction.

We were Black anarchists, and my friends took the notion of trespass further than I did. They squatted abandoned buildings. They hopped trains and saw parts of North America inaccessible by car. Lacking the courage to endanger myself like they did, I kept my trespasses local. I would drive to areas marked off-limits in Western Pennsylvania’s unofficial Green Book. If I wanted to see a punk show in Latrobe or visit an anime store in Greensburg, I went. As I saw it, the Klan could try and lynch me, but they’d have to catch me first.

George Jackson, political prisoner and author of The Prison Letters of George Jackson, warned against “protesting with the mouth,” in other words, lamenting the crimes of white people against Black bodies, in the misplaced belief there is justice to be found from airing your grievances. All white institutions are inherently racist and should be opposed, not appealed to.

When I started at Mills College in Oakland to get my MFA in creative writing, I expected some level of discrimination. But I wanted to live in the Bay and continue my studies, so I applied and got in. Attending Mills taught me that you could trespass in plain sight.

Being Black in the academy, I was treated like I was invisible, or worse, like a threat. My accomplishments existed outside of this white privilege space. I published articles and went on multistate book tours; I got yelled at by a computer professor for being in the lab prior to her starting her class. I wrote my second short story collection and a thesis; at the same time, I was eating ramen while watching caterers set up cakes on the lawn for donor parties. At a reading, a year into my studies, a poetry professor told me she’d just figured out I was a student and not somebody’s boyfriend.

Before the pandemic hit, I often returned to campus. The grounds are pretty, and I get to use the gym. During one visit, while checking out fliers in the English Department, one of my old professors approached me with a look of concern.


“May I help you?” she asked.

Metaphorical and literal trespass combined when I went to the University of Louisiana for my PhD. At first, I lived on a horse farm but it was too far from campus, so I moved in with an adjunct but that fell through. I became functionally homeless, moving between couches, guest rooms, hostels, and sleeping in my office for the next two years. Was sleeping in my office even trespassing if the administration admins and several colleagues knew about it?

A week into my predicament, I asked the head of the creative writing department if there was any emergency housing. “Let me look into it,” she said. The next day she gave me a yoga mat and sleeping bag.

Was sleeping in my office even trespassing if the administration admins and several colleagues knew about it?

Every time I looked for housing, the rent far exceeded what I earned, so I continued saving and paying off my loans and making stopgap arrangements. The discrepancy between my professional life and living arrangements grew absurd. Get flown to Omaha for a lit fest. Shower in the gym. Do a reading with Nalo Hopkinson. Stash my luggage above the particleboard ceiling. Teach three classes. Dodge late-night custodians to go to the bathroom. AWP in Boston. Vending machine Pop-Tarts.

Eventually a custodian told the department head where I was living. This upset me deeply; I saw it as working-class betrayal. I remember walking into the office to get my mail and getting told point-blank by the Head of the English Department, “I heard you’re living in your office,” in front of adjuncts, secretaries, and undergrads. I’ll never forget his look of triumph. That he could publicly shame me in this space he thought I was unworthy of.

“No,” I said, which was true. I crashed all over town. Then I picked up the student papers I would spend the next few hours grading.

I used my skill at trespass to enter an ugly place. I felt alone and depressed. Within a year, I was back in Oakland.

It’s easy to look back at my time in the academy with shame. I learned to diminish myself. Stay quiet for fear of being ousted. Speak the language people wanted to hear.

My experiences with the academy were reminders that all Black people in this country are considered trespassers, born enemies of the state. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was famously arrested for entering his own home. Our ethnic enclaves, where we should feel safe, are under perpetual siege by killers in uniform. And there was no level of accomplishment or respectability I could attain that would make me welcome in those spaces.

If property is violence, then the flouting of property is an act of rebellion that should be celebrated. The kids I knew who hopped trains were the same ones setting cop cars on fire, and our anger went deeper than politics. That is why, when we took highways in protest of Mike Brown’s murder, it was a show of strength. Deemed criminals from birth, we embraced that vulnerability and trespassed for a greater cause.

The ruined, abandoned Pittsburgh of my youth instilled in me a desire to go wherever I wanted. And seeing my people in the streets, I know trespass itself as a valiant act. White people deemed us trespassers, so let us do so.


The sun sets. I have gotten in my exercise and so I head downhill from the mansions to the less impressive — but still costly — townhouses, coated in sweat, ready to veg out to Netflix like every interminable night. From the house I am passing, I hear someone make gunshot noises. “Pew pew pew!”

I turn in time to see a chubby white child run inside. Surprised at first, then very much unsurprised, I stand for a moment and listen. I can hear him laugh maniacally.

I continue through the land of the wealthy, vigilant. ●


Elwin Cotman is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Dance on Saturday and two previous collections of short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. In 2011 he was nominated for a Carl Brandon Society Award. He has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He is at work on his first novel.
Contact Elwin Cotman at elwin.cotman@gmail.com.

AOC Nominated Sanders Because Of Procedure — And To Make A Point

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's short nominating speech for Bernie Sanders served a convention function — and pointed to a movement's future.

Ryan Brooks BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 18, 2020

Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders stand during his campaign event at the Whittemore Center Arena in Durham, New Hampshire, Feb. 10, 2020

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconded the largely symbolic nomination of Sen. Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee during the second night of the Democratic Party’s convention on Tuesday.

Ocasio-Cortez’s short speech was symbolic: Every candidate for president who brings delegates to the party convention is required to be formally nominated by someone, a role Ocasio-Cortez shared with former United Auto Workers union head Bob King. Her nomination came just a day after Sanders himself gave a speech to his supporters at the convention outlining Joe Biden’s healthcare plan and calling on his supporters to rally behind Biden’s campaign.

But Ocasio-Cortez, who is pointed to as one of the progressive movement’s next leaders, used her limited convention time to celebrate the movement Sanders has led. She gave a speech that focused on a vision for progressives that moved past Sanders’ campaign and spoke directly to the movement that progressives created around Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, while highlighting policies like universal healthcare and free higher education. She didn’t mention Sanders until nearly the end of her nomination.

“A movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“A movement that realizes the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few at the expense of long-term stability for the many and who organized a historic grassroots campaign to reclaim our democracy.”

Her speech then led into the roll call process that officially made Joe Biden the Democratic nominee for president. She has said she plans to vote for Biden in November and congratulated him in a tweet after her speech aired.


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOC

If you were confused, no worries! Convention rules require roll call & nominations for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold. I was asked to 2nd the nom for Sen. Sanders for roll call. I extend my deepest congratulations to @JoeBiden - let’s go win in November. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/uI92P3UfLn01:57 AM - 19 Aug 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite


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Clarissa-Jan Lim · Aug. 19, 2020

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Henry J. Gomez · Aug. 18, 2020


Ryan Brooks is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

A Trump Ethics Board Just Voted To Block Most Fetal Tissue Research

“People may die unnecessarily because the administration has allowed an ideological special interest group to hijack biomedical research,” one expert said, citing the wide use of fetal cells in coronavirus vaccine research.

Dan Vergano BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, D.C.
Posted on August 19, 2020

The Washington Post / The Washington Post via Getty Im
A mouse used for fetal tissue research at UCLA.

A Trump administration fetal tissue ethics panel voted to scrap 13 of 14 National Institutes of Health medical research proposals already approved for federal funding by scientists, according to a newly released report.

The NIH “Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board” was announced more than a year ago, part of a broad Trump administration move to curtail federal research involving fetal cells, which are widely used in medical research but have become a flashpoint for abortion opponents in the last decade. The ethics board’s membership was not revealed until the morning of its first meeting on July 31, when it became clear the Trump administration had stacked it with abortion opponents.

Headed by bioethicist Paige Comstock Cunningham, interim president of the evangelical Taylor University in Indiana, the panel overwhelmingly voted to nix the proposals for research involving fetal cells, the new report revealed. Because of confidentiality rules, the substance of each proposal was not disclosed, only the nature of the discussions and votes. The only proposal that received a majority of votes needed to be funded used cells already in a repository and was aimed at developing alternatives to using fetal cells.

The votes now go directly to Department of Health and Human Services head Alex Azar for final decisions on the funding of the proposals, sidelining NIH chief Francis Collins. If Azar sits on the report and takes no action by November when federal funding cycles end, he would effectively deny the proposals funding, the Washington Post noted.

Human fetal tissue cultures, cells derived from abortions, have been widely used in medical research and in vaccines for decades, with rules codifying their use erected in the early 1990s. At least half a dozen current coronavirus vaccine candidates use the cells, widely seen as a “gold standard” for tissue studies in many fields including AIDS research, according to a July 28 letter sent to the ethics panel by more than 90 scientific organizations.

Research advocates condemned the vote to nix the research grants, calling the ethics board’s decision an imposition of anti-abortion politics into medical research.

“At a time when the US and the world should be employing every biomedical research avenue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, a crucial tool for investigating viral diseases has been blocked by special interests,” International Society for Stem Cell Research president Christine Mummery said in a statement. “People may die unnecessarily because the administration has allowed an ideological special interest group to hijack biomedical research.”

Meanwhile, abortion opponents applauded the result. Mallory Quigley of the Susan B. Anthony List said in a statement that the panel “was a serious review of the ethical considerations surrounding use of human fetal tissue in research.”

By charter, the panel is required to have only a third of its members be scientists, with other slots set aside for lawyers, doctors, and theologians. At least 10 of the board’s 15 members were opponents of abortion, fetal tissue science, or related research, according to Science Magazine, while only one member, neuroscientist Lawrence Goldstein of the University of California, San Diego, has spoken in favor of fetal tissue research.

Many of the objections to proposals described in the report revolved around the completeness of tissue donation consent forms. Although the panel was not supposed to evaluate the scientific merits of the proposals, many objections involved contentions that the amount of tissue required was excessive or that fetal tissues from spontaneous miscarriages could instead be substituted for ones from abortions.

“Miscarriages are useless for this research,” Stanford developmental biologist Irving Weissman told BuzzFeed News in response, noting the implausibility of asking a woman who just had a miscarriage to provide the cells under sterile conditions and the difficulty in retrieving living cells. "Its a non-starter."

"This was not about science or the health of born humans in the USA and in the World,” Weissman added by email. “It was about imposing religious beliefs strongly held by a distinct minority of people in the US on the rest of us, even though it will surely result in disease and deaths.”

Two board members wrote a dissenting opinion for the report, stating: “This board was clearly constituted …so as to include a large majority of members who are on the public record as being opposed to human fetal tissue research of any type. This was clearly an attempt to block funding of as many contracts and grants as possible.” The dissenters noted that panel members had even voted against proposals aimed at developing “humanized” mouse cell alternatives to human fetal tissue. These votes “will paradoxically fail to reduce the use of human fetal tissue in the development of humanized mice needed for therapy development including for COVID-19,” they wrote.

NIH did not provide a statement about the status of its research grants with the release of the July meeting report.

“The lack of NIH leadership to call attention to all of this is puzzling but understandable,” said Weissman. In the past, NIH officials could take a strong principled stand, and be fired or resign knowing there were many experts to replace them and keep research and clinical trials going.

“But virtually every person replaced by Trump and his administration has only one quality — complete loyalty to him — not domain expertise,” Weissman said. “So I can understand the personal ethical dilemma of keeping silent on some issues to protect the larger goals.”


MORE ON THIS
Trump Just Stacked A Fetal Cell Research Panel With Abortion Opponents

Dan Vergano · July 31, 2020

The Trump Administration Is Going To Review All Fetal Tissue Research

Dan Vergano · Sept. 25, 2018

The Last Decade Was Disastrous For Abortion Rights. Advocates Are Trying To Figure Out What’s Next.

Ema O'Connor · Dec. 17, 2019


Dan Vergano is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

A Facebook Executive Protected Hate Speech In India. Now She Wants Police Protection.

Ankhi Das reportedly protected right-wing politicians from punishment for violating the social network’s rules — and is now facing death threats.

Pranav DixitBuzzFeed News Reporter

Ryan MacBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From
New Delhi
Posted on August 18, 2020

Facebook
Ankhi Das and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.


One of Facebook’s top executives in India wants police to investigate death threats and abuse she’s received on the social network after a news story revealed she herself had intervened to keep anti-Muslim hate speech online from politicians of India’s ruling Bharatiya Jana Party.

On Monday, Ankhi Das, Facebook’s public policy director for India, South and Central Asia, filed a police report in New Delhi that named six Facebook and Twitter accounts she said were making threats against her, asking police to arrest the people behind the accounts and provide her with protection.

The move came after the Wall Street Journal reported that Das had shielded T. Raja Singh, a state-level politician with the BJP, and at least three other Hindu nationalists, from punishment for violating Facebook’s hate speech rules. In posts on Facebook, Singh reportedly called for the slaughter of Muslims, which led the social network’s security staff to determine that he should be banned under its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations.”

But because Das reportedly determined that punishing BJP officials would be bad for business, Singh has been allowed to continue using the platform.

Das did not respond to a request for comment.

The claims about Facebook’s preferential treatment of India’s conservative party comes after BuzzFeed News reported that her colleagues on the company’s policy team intervened to prevent right-wing organizations in the United States from being punished for sharing misinformation. Those reports have caused outrage among Facebook’s employees, who have asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg why executives including Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy and Das’s boss, have helped conservative pages including Breitbart News and PragerU skirt their rules.

While Kaplan has already been under pressure, Das — who has been at Facebook since 2011 — is now the subject of scrutiny. On Tuesday, members of the Congress party, India's main opposition, wrote a letter to Zuckerberg demanding an investigation into the company’s India operations. Members of the Aam Aadmi party, which governs Delhi, said that they would summon Das and other Facebook executives to question them about the Journal's report.

That inquiry could expand nationally: On Sunday, Shashi Tharoor, a Congress party member of Parliament and the head of India’s parliamentary information technology committee, tweeted that the committee would “certainly wish to hear from Facebook.”

In addition to threats on Twitter, Das has also become the subject of abuse on Facebook’s own platforms.

“Since the evening of 14 August 2020, I have been receiving violent threats to my life and body.”

“Since the evening of 14 August 2020, I have been receiving violent threats to my life and body, and I am extremely disturbed by the relentless harassment meted out to me by the accused persons,” Das wrote in her police complaint. “The content, which even includes my photograph, is evidently threatening to my life and body and I fear for my safety as well as that of my family members. The content also maligns my reputation based on a news article and I am subjected to name-calling, cyber bullying and [sexual harassment] online.”

As of Tuesday morning, some of the tweets seemed to have been deleted, but some of the Facebook accounts behind the abuse were still active. Das’s Instagram account was also targeted by people calling for her to be hanged.

“Even women’s rights groups and the feminists won’t be able to save you if you don’t mend your ways,” one of the threats on Facebook said in Hindi.

Anyesh Roy, who heads the Delhi Police’s cyber crime department, did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone declined to comment for this story, but shared an earlier statement that didn’t specifically name Das.

“We prohibit hate speech and content that incites violence and we enforce these policies globally without regard to anyone’s political position or party affiliation,” he said.

One of Facebook’s top policy executives outside of the US, Das is tightly connected to the BJP, helping oversee one of the company’s most important and populous markets with more than 300 million users. A 2016 Guardian article about Facebook’s controversial internet access program, Free Basics, which India banned in 2016 for violating net neutrality, described her as enjoying “uncommonly good access in Delhi’s corridors of power.”

Former employees who worked with Das directly in the past and who did not wish to be named described her to BuzzFeed News as a “tough boss.” For years, Das and her team operated nearly independently of the rest of the company in the country, reportedly working out of a $40,000-a-month collection of suites in a five-star hotel in central Delhi, miles away from Facebook’s Indian headquarters in the city of Gurgaon.

“She’s a strong personality,” a person familiar with Das told BuzzFeed News. “She may not be the easiest boss to work with, but I do think her words carry a fair bit of weight within the company.”

“She’s actively involved in Facebook’s business decisions in India,” another person familiar with Das’s work said.

People close to Das who spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity said that keeping politicians happy was part of her job.

“Facebook won’t be allowed to function in India if they stand up to the government.”

“Unlike the US, it is not possible to stand up to the government and have your business survive,” one of them said. “A Ben & Jerry’s can be openly anti-Trump and still not be hit with crazy lawsuits or have their CEO arrested. However broken that country might be, the rule of law there is still strong. Facebook won’t be allowed to function in India if they stand up to the government.”

“That said,” they added, “I can’t say I am not disappointed by what happened.”

Part of the anger directed toward Das stems from the fact that she has also shared anti-Muslim content on her own Facebook page. On Friday, the Journal reported that Das republished a post from Najmul Hoda, a former police official, that called India’s Muslims a “degenerate community” for whom “nothing except purity of religion and implementation of Shariah matter.”

The post “spoke to me last night,” Das wrote on Facebook last December. “As it should to [the] rest of India.”

BuzzFeed News found it wasn’t the only anti-Muslim post that she’s shared from Hoda. In April, the former police official wrote a long note suggesting that the Muslim community “act responsibly” to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the country. While the post did not contain specific instances of misinformation linking Muslims to the pandemic, it came around the same time as far-right Indian politicians and news channels were vilifying Indian Muslims for spreading the virus, sparking a wave of anti-Muslim hate speech across the country.

“Najmul Hoda - thank you for being a voice of reason and sanity,” Das wrote after reposting his note on her page, which features a cover photo of herself in conversation with Zuckerberg. “Hopefully this will lead to the right kind of awakening and voluntary collective action to thwart this epidemiological nightmare.”


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AUTHORS

Pranav Dixit is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Delhi.

Ryan Mac is a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

U.S. targets Uganda adoption scheme with charges, sanctions

More than 30 Ugandan children were adopted by U.S. clients through this scheme between 2013 and 2016, federal prosecutors said.

HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS SLAVERY BY ANY OTHER NAME


Aug. 17 (UPI) -- The Trump administration has filed charges and imposed sanctions against an adoption scheme that removed more than two dozen Ugandan children from their families and placed them in American homes.

The Justice Department on Monday announced a 13-count indictment filed in the Northern District of Ohio late last week charging three women with arranging adoptions of Ugandan children through bribing Ugandan officials and defrauding U.S. adoptive parents as well as participating in a polish adoption scheme.

The indicted names Margaret Cole, 73, of Strongsville, Ohio; Debra Parris, 68, of Lake Dallas, Texas, and Ugandan lawyer Dorah Mirembe as defendants who face a slew of conspiracy and fraud charges.

"These three defendants preyed on the emotions of parents, those wanting the best for their child and those wishing to give what they thought was an orphaned child a family to love," Special Agent in Charge Eric B. Smith of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cleveland Field Office said in a statement. "These defendants allegedly lied to both sides of the adoption process, and bribed Ugandan officials who were responsible for the welfare of children. Parents, prospective parents and children were emotionally vested and were heartbroken when they learned of the selfishness and greed in which these three engaged."

According to the complaint, Cole ran an adoption agency out of Strongsville that facilitated intercountry adoptions from Uganda, Poland and other countries with Parris responsible for managing aspects of the agency's Uganda program while Mirembe, a Ugandan citizen, provided them with adoption-related services, such as legal representation.

The complaint accuses Parris and Mirembe of bribing Ugandan government officials to "corruptly procure adoptions of Ugandan children" while concealing that fact from Americans seeking to adopt the children through the U.S. adoption agency.

"Many of the Ugandan children whose adoptions Parris and Mirembe had procured through bribery and fraud were not properly determined to be orphans, and certain of the children were ultimately returned to their birth mothers in Uganda after Adoption Agency's clients came to believe that these birth mothers had not knowingly given their children up for adoption," the complaint states.

More than 30 Ugandan children were adopted by U.S. clients who paid the agency more than $900,000 between 2013 and 2016 during this scheme, prosecutors said in the complaint.

The State Department said in a statement that Mirembe's law firm sought out "vulnerable families in remote Ugandan villages," promising parents that their children would be moved to Uganda's capital of Kampala to further their education.

Once in Kampala, the children would be placed in an unlicensed children's home and American prospective parents would travel to the African country to adopt them.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday sanctioned four Ugandans for participating in the scheme, stating they removed young children from Ugandan families under promises of special education programs and study in the United States.

Mirembe, her associate Patrick Ecobu and Ugandan Judges Moses Mukiibi and Wilson Musalu Musene were blacklisted Monday by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, blocking all property and interests in property that they control in the United States while barring American citizens from doing business with them.

The State Department said Mirembe, with Ecobu, facilitated bribes to the Ugandan judges and other government officials to fraudulently procure adoption cases.

"Deceiving innocent Ugandan families into giving up their children for adoption has caused great suffering," Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Justin G. Muzinich said in a statement. "The individuals involved in this corrupt scam deliberately exploited the good faith of Ugandans and Americans to enrich themselves."

The Justice Department also charged Cole and Parris over transferring a Polish adoptee to Parris' relatives who were not eligible for adoption as one of them had a criminal arrest record. After the child was physically abused, Cole and Parris concealed the improper conduct from U.S. officials and from the Polish authority responsible for adoptions to continue profiting from such practices.

upi.com/7030393

NORAD begins air exercise over Arctic Ocean
NORAD DOES MORE THAN TRACK SANTA

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A U.S. Air Force F-15 arrived at Canadian Forces Northern Area Headquarters Yellowknife, Northwest Territory, on Tuesday to participate in a weeklong NORAD exercise. Photo courtesy of NORAD/Twitter

Aug. 19 (UPI) -- An Arctic Ocean air exercise involving Canadian and U.S. planes is underway this week, the North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] announced.

A U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane and F-15 fighter planes arrived at the Canadian Forces Northern Area Headquarters Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, on Tuesday for air defense exercises, with flights ranging from the Beaufort Sea [north of Alaska] to Thule AB [Air Base] in Greenland, a NORAD Twitter message said.
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A KC-10 refueling plane, and Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 fighter planes, a CP-140 long-range patrol aircraft and a CC-150T refueling plane are also involved.

NORAD, a 60 year-old partnership between the air forces of United States and Canada, emphasized in a statement last week that all flights will be at high altitude over sparsely populated terrain, and that the exercise has no connection to either government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

RELATED U.S. intercepts more Russian military planes near Alaska

"NORAD routinely conducts exercises with a variety of scenarios including airspace restriction violations, hijackings and responses to unknown aircraft," the statement added. "NORAD carefully plans and closely controls all exercises. This air defense exercise provides us the opportunity to hone our skills as Canadian and U.S. forces operate together with our allies and partners in the Arctic."

Several scenarios, including violations of sovereign airspace, will be practiced. NORAD is regularly involved in interception of Russian military aircraft entering the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone.

In June, a NORAD statement said, U.S. F-22 jets intercepted four Russian Tu-142 planes that came within 65 nautical miles of the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska and "loitered in the ADIZ for nearly 8 hours."